If your torrents are downloading too slowly and you want to improve your download speed in Azureus, you’ve come to the right place. Azureus is a bittorrent client, namely, a program you can use to download files at high rates across the internet from a variety of peers. It’s a p2p (peer to peer) filesharing program, and may get you in trouble with legal authorities (RIAA, MPAA) if you use it illegally. However, it has plenty of non-infringing uses, as well.

Today I downloaded a torrent at 1.12 MB/s:

On a regular 10 Mb/s LAN that’s the best you’re going to be able to do, but only if your bit torrent program is configured properly. There are a few things you can do to improve performance in Azureus, and here they are:

1) Uncap the Windows XP SP2 Connections Limit

Service pack 2 limited the TCP/IP stack to 10 half-open connections–there rest are queued–to reduce virus spread rate. Unfortunately, this cripples a p2p program. Open those connections with this patch: EvID4226Patch223d-en.zip. Install at your own risk, but it works great for me with the limit increased from 10 to 100 or 200. You could go as high as 500 if you wanted, but that might be overkill.

2) Setup Port Forwarding

You need a path from your p2p program to the peers, and if you’re using a home firewall, make sure you forward the port that Azureus uses to your computer. This tutorial will help you–you can find the find the Azureus port in the first Options screen:

3) Setup Advanced Network Settings

Go to Options->Connection->Advanced Network Settings. You’ll see a screen like this:

You want a lot of simultaneous connections, so set the “max simultaneous outbound connection attempts” field to something just under what you set the Windows XP connection limit to in the hack in #1. I had 100 XP connections, so I set 64 in Azureus.

4) Upload Transfer

Go to Options->Transfer. You’ll see this screen:

You should set the “global max upload speed” 100-300KB/s, so that you can spend most of your connection bandwidth on downloading, and not uploading. However, the bit torrent protocol requires you to upload, so you should not set this less than 100 KB/s unless you’re on a very slow connection.

This is interesting, and at the same time scary. According to Engadget, Apple’s Fairplay (TM) DRM has been hacked for the new iPhone 3G App Store, and the applications themselves are appearing on torrent sites:

There’s also a more traditional crack which allows apps to be stripped of DRM and shared without using iTunes, although you’ll have to jailbreak your phone to do it. The first app to be widely pirated is Super Monkey Ball, which isn’t surprising, and it seems like several other apps have followed it out onto various torrent sites. In addition to the relatively simple jailbreak procedure, running cracked apps requires you to open up SSH access and do some mucking around, so unless your time is worth less than $10, it’s probably not worth it.

The latest apps appearing on a torrent search for iPhone include Crash Bandicoot Nitro Kart 3D, Super Monkey Ball, iBeer, and Enigmo, a total (so far) of $32.96 of potential revenue destroyed by hackers.

After the WWDC ‘08 Keynote, everyone wanted this iPhone game, it received almost as much hype as the iPhone itself. Super Monkey Ball from SEGA definitely has some good qualities, however it does have some bad qualities as well. First off, this game costs $9.99 which might be a little steep for some.

1. Make sure you are on firmware 2.0
2. Download the Super Monkey Ball Cracked file and extract the .ipa file from the archive to your desktop.
3. Drag and drop the Monkey Ball.ipa file into the iTunes application folder and wait for it to install.

So because an irate iPhone user believes the Super Monkey Ball game costs too much at $9.99, he creates a hacked version and gives it away for free. I actually paid for Super Monkey Ball, because it’s one of the few applications worth my $9.99, and I advise you to as well. If there’s no financial market for creating great iPhone applications, the entire market will suffer, and we’ll have crappy apps to run on our $400 phones.